There was a report on the BBC Breakfast programme today about the threat of rising sea levels to historic castles on our coast. The BBC bleated that these castles, which had protected Britain’s coasts for hundreds of years, were now being destroyed by rising sea levels due to climate change. The BBC claimed that “scientists have predicted that sea levels could rise by a metre by the end of this century”.
This reminded me of a BBC documentary, Earth Under Water made by the BBC in 2010. In this documentary the BBC presented two scenarios – a two metre sea-level rise by 2100 and a five metre sea-level rise by 2200. Using these two ‘scenarios’, the BBC showed the terrifying consequences for coastal cities and low-lying land from these predicted sea-level rises.
I guess the one positive one can take from the two programmes is that the BBC has reduced its prediction of sea-level rise by 2100 from two metres to a mere one metre.
But let’s test whether a sea-level rise of two metres or even one metre by 2100 is credible.
Here’s a table of sea-level rises from 1880 to 1980.
Notice at least two things:
- The sea-level is rising somewhere between 10cm and 12cm per hundred years. We have just 78 years till the year 2100. Yet at the current rate, it would take about 1,000 years for the sea level to rise by one metre and around 2,000 years for the sea level to rise by two metres. So the idea that the sea level could rise by one metre (or even two metres) in the next 78 years is complete nonsense.
- The sea level is rising by different rates at different locations and is even apparently falling by 37cm per century around Scandinavia.
It’s a pity that nobody at the BBC has read my book There is No Climate Crisis. If they had, they would know what’s really happening and stop making their wildly exaggerated, nonsensical claims of impending climate catastrophe. Here’s just a small excerpt from my book about supposed rising sea levels:
The changes, or more accurately apparent changes, in sea levels are also partly due to factors like Tectonic Plate Movement, Glacial Isostatic Adjustment, Post-Glacial Rebound and subsidence due to water abstraction around major cities. Tectonic Plate Movement is, of course, the continual movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates, which give us earthquakes and tsunamis. Glacial Isostatic Adjustment has been going on for at least two million years. Massive glaciers grow and then melt, alternately depressing the Earth’s crust and then releasing it again. As we are now in an interglacial, which has led to melting ice, Scandinavia is slowly rising. Hence, the sea level at Stockholm appears to be falling.
The Post-Glacial Rebound, which is causing much of the East Coast of North America to sink, occurs because large areas of Canada and America were weighed down by massive ice sheets in the last Ice Age. When that ice melted between 26,500 and 7,000 years ago, land in the centre of the North American began to rise while land around the periphery sank in what has been described as a “sort of sea-saw effect”. Hence sea levels at the East Coast of America seem to be rising faster than in many other areas of the world. Meanwhile in California on the U.S. West Coast, around 8 million of the state’s 40 million inhabitants are believed to live in areas where the land is subsiding probably partly due to Tectonic Movements and partly due to subsidence caused by increased water abstraction.
Looking at the table above one of the largest apparent sea level increases has been 30cm in 100 years at the East Coast of North America where the land has been sinking due to Post-Glacial Rebound. The sea level for Scandinavia has apparently ‘dropped’ by 37cm in 100 years as the land has risen due to Glacial Isostatic rebound. A National Land Survey of Finland study completed in early 2021 calculated that the South Coast of Sweden was rising by at least 1mm a year, further north the uplift was 2mm to 3mm a year and in central Finland the land uplift might be as much as 8mm to 9mm a year.
Jakarta is thought to be subsiding by 25 cm a year largely because of groundwater extraction. Houston is sinking as the oil wells beneath it are depleted. Bangkok’s and Shanghai’s skyscrapers are weighing the two cities down. London is slowly sinking partly due to water abstraction and partly due to Post-Glacial Rebound which is causing Scotland to slowly rise, like Sweden and Finland, after having been weighed down by glaciers during the last ice age.
A report by scientists in 2019 suggested that the real sea level rise due purely to thermal expansion caused by global warming was just 0.7mm a year: “Sea level rise by thermal expansion is likely less than 0.7mm/year… Subsidence is the main contributor of sea level rise in many areas of the world.”
Here, to finish, is a simple chart comparing rising sea levels with rising levels of atmospheric CO2, where the lack of relationship between the two is clear.
David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon. This article was first published on his blog.
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Yes, keep tapping at the little things,but use ridicule not anger. One of the destructive acts against the USSR and Communism was the humour and ridicule that came from the people.
It rots a system. We can do the same.
Humour, indeed. And the beauty of humour is that the nasty barstewards must laugh along. Because if they don’t, they will reveal that the joke is TRUE!
Except that the woke dont understand humour, hence the treatment of Gervaise because they didn’t realise he was using it to make his points.
I think one of the best soviet jokes was that they could make a nuclear bomb that fitted in a suitcase.
Only Problem was they didn’t have any suitcases!
Says it all in one joke.
A friend of mine lived in North Korea. Called him up one day and asked “how’s it going over there”?
He replied “I can’t complain!”
Or “What is the difference between a Just Stop Oil Protester and a plank of wood”? —————The Grain.
An evolutionary clinical psychologist I rather like (Dr Doug Lisle) says that the best way to have discussions on difficult topics with people is to start by saying “I don’t have all the answers” (apparently it’s disarming and takes people off the defensive). Then you can ask gentle questions like “I don’t know, do you think furlough, for all the support it provided, maybe has led to all this inflation?”)
That’s the only way people can stomach discussion, if you start with humility (even if it’s a bit contrived!!).
I find it impossible to appear humble without appearing patronising.
But the main point being, however you say it, say it. Just try to keep it impersonal. And stay optimistic; always try to present the way out.
Yes, quite right. No point just steaming in there with facts and logic. It hurts them. As a salesman of some experience, I can say that the best way of influencing the buyer standing in front of you (and who usually hates you) is initially to concede something – a sop to the buyer’s vanity. Throw in phrases like “You know more about this than I do” – give them the moral high ground, and then, as you say, ask a question or two – allow them slowly to realise that they’re not actually standing on the high ground, or maybe that there isn’t any high ground. This way you can get them to a position of a kind of parity. Often it’s best to stop right there – without trying to make any kind of factual point (such as that the Covid vaccine doesn’t work, or tranny “women’ are not female). First, instil the ideas that 1) You are not an expert, 2) That neither is the ‘buyer’, 3) That the actual experts don’t half get it wrong sometimes, don’t they! Then walk away. It’s all we can do.
Excellent article
You have said it for me- thanks Marcus.
The picture needs a caption: ‘Gis a job, I can do that‘ springs to mind
Plenty of people “understand science and technology”, we aren’t in positions of power, or funded bysupra-national organisations
The author comes across as one of thiose sneering humanities types, that thinks becauase somebody of his “towering intellect” doesn’t understand it, nobody can.
The image attached reminded me of the identity of one of that groups funders: Dale Vince. Quite recently, the Foreign Office funded branch of the propaganda channel did a decent item about him and his background. They went so far as to say that he had been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), as well as commenting on his educational history. Quite a few bugs in his thinking, a cynic might say.
It could be argued that many senior leaders are often abnormal in some shape or form, otherwise they wouldn’t be there.
“This doesn’t require a conspiracy by the way. That is just what the profit motive will do when untrammelled by conscience or virtue. For the controlling minority of society it is extremely lucrative to promote the Pandelusion. For the majority, the result is an expensive, destructive, disempowering rip-off.”
Sorry but doesn’t this paragraph contradict itself? It seems to me to describe a conspiracy, or a series of related conspiracies. It is not describing cock-ups.
A good piece and it mirrors my own thinking. Personally, I don’t believe we win any hearts and minds by shouting “they’re trying to kill us all!” or “they’re injecting people with a bioweapon!”. Regardless of what I actually believe, I always go with slowly, slowly, catchy monkey. I’ve found that appearing to be a little confused about things generally creates a mirror response and sets the cogs of alternative thought in motion. Sowing a seed seems to be a better approach than planting a fully grown oak tree in someone’s front garden.
‘Too many people believe things that are not true.’
Nailed it.
That is the major fault line in democracy (the least worst form of government).
Impossible to replace the people.
After a conversation I had over the weekend with an Italian acquaintance, I give up.
“I don’t follow politics, I’m not political……Meloni is a fascist…..I got covid on holiday, I’ve been vaccinated three times…..during covid I had to wear a mask for a year at work, take a test every day and get vaccinated otherwise I would be suspended without pay indefinitely from the my government teaching job….”
(For those who don’t follow Italian politics, Meloni wasn’t in charge during covid – it was a “left wing” government, which couldn’t possibly be “fascist”).
It isn’t always that things are “Not True”. There can be an element of truth to it. The Climate Crisis eg is a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency for which no evidence exists. But this allows for policies to be put in place because proponents of climate change can say that “climate change is real”. Which has to be one of the most absurd statements I have ever heard. But often the best political slogans are so ambiguous they can mean anything that the person uttering them wants them to mean. ———-eg “Vote for Change”. ——-But Change from what and to what? How many people do you know who go around saying “I want Change”? ——It doesn’t mean anything at all, but it sounds like it does. So, it isn’t always just a case of things being TRUE or FALSE or BLACK or WHITE. It is just that the focus is all on the BLACK, making it appear there is no WHITE.
That is because they are being taught things that are not true in schools.
A good article Hugo and Carl Sagan’s quote resonated with me – I am saving that.
I am science trained and follow much of this closely. So, in the interests of accuracy you might want to fix a couple of errors of fact which to me undermine your case.
You simply don’t need to change electric car batteries every 5 years, they degrade slowly and predictably and in general will be usable for hundreds of thousands of miles. EV manufacturers fully warrant their batteries for 7 or 8 years. Of course there will be a few hard failures with time and that’s a risk but overall quite a small one I believe.
Secondly lithium is not mined in the Congo, they don’t have any significant reserves. I think you are confusing it with cobalt, which is used in some (but not all) lithium based EV batteries. Manufacturers such as Tesla are working to eliminate cobalt from all their batteries in the future.
Great article. Perfect quite from a very wise man.
But when people are bombarded every day with a barrage of politicised absurdity masquerading as some kind of ultimate truth then what can you expect? People are busy with work and family life and don’t have time to investigate every issue. They think and expect that Investigative Journalists are doing that for them. —-Alas NO. They are NOT.———— Mainstream Journalism is mostly not about investigating things, but about pushing political agenda’s and the five main ones are Equality, Diversity, Race, Gender and Climate. —–Propaganda is a very powerful tool and it very often achieves its objective. On the issue of climate eg instead of asking questions, many people brainwashed by the stream of misinformation will tend to glue themselves to the road and buildings clamouring for their own impoverishment and acting as useful idiots for their eco socialist pretend to save the planet governments.